In Twin Peaks

I grew up in Twin Peaks. Or at least, a 30-minute drive away. Through forested back roads, lies an identical town to my own: North Bend, Washington State. And North Bend and Snoqualmie is where David Lynch and his collaborators filmed the pilot and much more for the entirety of 25 years of Twin Peaks.

It was seized from the indigenous Snoqualmie and Salish peoples by brutal violence, then colonized by some of the last Americans to make their way to a remote corner of the Pacific Northwest. There’s the inherent darkness in American life that hides in the grain of Lynch’s images, right there. I imagine those settlers were outcasts and oddballs, and they arrived so late at the start of the 20th century they couldn’t totally conquer the landscape, and it got inside the families who moved there. Two of them were David Lynch and Kyle McLachlan, and they’ve both spoken of bonding over their Pacific NW childhoods.

I believe it’s pretty obvious that Mandy doesn’t exist without David Lynch’s work. Any time you make a film there are other works of art you’re following in the footsteps of, such as Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart, that connects you to a shared continuity of cinema. And there are shared values and beliefs as artists that Lynch lit a gigantic fucking fire under our asses with. Definitely a certain kind of humor. But more importantly, I think it’s also that Panos [Cosmatos] and I shared childhoods in those forests and mountains, and that we both had and were possibly permanently warped by the Dune (1984) action figures that improbably or inappropriately were sold that Christmas to young children like us. Over the years I’ve said very little about the process of writing Mandy, but the one thing I’ve stood by that’s all I need to say, is that for me, as the co-writer for the director, it was all about helping my friend not get lost in the woods.

People from the Pacific Northwest share a sense memory of those antediluvian, primordial trees, everything misted by rain, fog, and looming mountains. We all know the memory of lone traffic lights swaying, or diners glowing like faint candles in the night. None of those were shots from a television show when, and where, I was growing up. It was documentary footage. Or maybe more than that: memories, dreams.

The first person I contacted when I heard we’d lost Lynch was my sister, and we barely needed words to share the loss. It was like losing family, a beloved uncle we’d never met or heard from. He was trying to get us to experience life beyond language. We’d grown up without religion, but Lynch gave us symbols, mysteries, interpretations that could lead you to meaning if you let it. We did talk about how Twin Peaks is at times indistinguishable from our memories.

There’s a lot of heaviness implied there, about how we grew up in the shadow of what they called the Green River serial killer. In my own high school, I don’t recall an exact Laura Palmer, but I do remember the sweetest punk girl named Kirsten. In the space of a few months, she got pregnant, crashed her car into the high school Principal’s, her little brother died in a freak landslide, and then a light aircraft crashed in her front yard. That was reality, just down the road from Twin Peaks. That our entire wholesome town and every suburban home was full of violence, repression, oppression, racism, homophobia and secrets, that we drove by our local tribe’s reservation that our land was stolen from almost daily is something we’re still working out as adults. What year is it, indeed.

But lately I’ve been comforted rewatching Twin Peaks. Just as a grey haired Bobby Briggs says in the Return, hilariously, hysterically, and in a way that genuinely moves me to tears: “Man, that brings back some memories”. What’s easy to forget about David Lynch, what none of his imitators ever get right, is the sincerity, the truth, the lightness. There’s such a solid, unshakeable belief in the human potential for love. There’s idealism about people and acceptance and sheer wonder and amazement of everyone’s individuality – even, in 1991, a trans person. There’s absolute belief in small joys and pleasures to near religious levels: cups of coffee, cigarettes, clothes and hair, couples kissing, great, great music.

The thing I’d like to point out about such a unique artist, who left such an expanse of imagination for us all to explore and ponder for the rest of our own lives, is how, yes, his work was surreal and abstract, and mysterious – but that often dismisses how it was also sincere, grounded, truthful, true. There’s a constant sensation in Lynch’s art that once you look away from it, you’ll encounter some kind of similar high strangeness in the world, if only because he’s illuminated that it’s all around us all the time. The memorials that sprang up as if by magic outside the Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles and Twede’s in North Bend are testament to it. He made art that synchronizes you with the world in ways that are easy to forget.

Long ago I left the woods for New York City, but in April 2014 I took a girlfriend to North Bend as we road tripped down the West Coast – a visit to part of the puzzle pieces that I’m made of. We went to the gorgeous waterfall, stayed at the hotel at its top (reasonable rates, fantastic room service, lots of wood, staggering fresh air and terrific sleep). The next day we drove into North Bend, headed for the diner for the pilgrimage of coffee and cherry pie.

A large part of the town had been destroyed. Vaporized into debris. A mysterious gas explosion at a pizza restaurant had leveled a large part of town days earlier. We were still able to get incredible coffee. But it was the perfect way to share with someone that this was the Twin Peaks I grew up in. Not a TV show, but a place I love so much, where you’ve gotta be prepared for the tragedies.

In this horrifying time, when the darkness is seeping into every American house, radiating outward from the biggest one, I note how much the vibe and aesthetic of America’s politicians resemble Lynch’s most terrible villains, all abusive men. When I see swaying trees at night now, I’m never scared. They remind me they’re even older than the darkness we brought with us, and it could be inside anyone, something Lynch continually explored.

So many of us are hanging on to Lynch’s line: “Fix your hearts or die.” I think it’s an all timer, a line that will outlive us all, and the good that Lynch believes in, how he used the word “beautiful” all the time to describe so many things in life and art, will have a resurgence some day as the fucking clown comics perish and are forgotten. As someone who came from Twin Peaks, I urge you, I offer a clue, to make sure to look out for all the beauty and love David Lynch left for us to revisit in his absence, as we keep working on fixing our hearts, and fighting for all the strange, beautiful, mysterious people to live.

To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.